Mapping

Bing updated (automatic translation) its imagery for large parts of Germany on the 11 & 12th of July. It is not known (yet) if this only affects Germany. The new imagery is at a lower resolution and its offset should be checked before using it by comparing it with other permitted imagery sources and the available GPS tracks!

Argentina’s national mapping agency IGN made some of their aerial imagery available for OSM mapping. Presets are available already in JOSM, but a little more time is needed for the services themselves.

The tagging mailing list attempts to pinpoint the meaning of the word “office” (at least for mapping purposes), with the consequence of questioning many other definitions.

Steve All reported on the Talk-US mailing list that there are differences between the data of the US Census bureau and the states for administrative boundaries. This also means that some boundaries in OSM have incorrect admin_level tags. Update: please see also Steve’s comment below.

John Whelan talks in his blog post about how the recent Stats Canada Building import into OSM came about and how the origins lie in OC Transpo’s efforts to improve accessibility for their partially sighted riders some years ago.

Richard Fairhurst explains how you can easily capture the height of bridges using aerial imagery together with photographs from Mapillary, OpenStreetCam and, in the British Isles, Geograph. A video of a notorious low bridge in Durham, NC, emphasises why this is so important for HGV routing. Thanks to Jeff for the correction

User Trockennaseaffe is busy mapping ticket validator machines. He encountered OpenStationMap’s proposed tagging vending=ticket_validator, but he was encouraged to use the clearer amenity=ticket_validator instead.

Community

Jinal Foflia writes a Mapbox blog showcasing this year’s State of the Map conferences around the world. This map was made using the GeoJSON that contained the location co-ordinates of all the event venues, the icons from the various SotM and their respective websites. You can refer to this example for doing something similar.

All other rendering issues having been resolved, discussion over at OSM-Carto’s GitHub issues turns to whether a submarine is a ship.

Sukhjit Singh Sehra et al. published a paper about the analysis of the abstracts of 485 papers about OSM from 2007 to 2016. They used latent semantic analysis to identify research trends regarding OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Events

FOSS4G 2017 HOKKAIDO took place in Sapporo (Hokkaido, Japan) on the 30th of June and 1st of July. The event was a hands-on day and a case presentation day. They were a great success on both. Check the videos and Twitter summary.

OSM Geography Awareness Week, that will take place in many locations around the world in November, is already in action – check the map for an event near you, or propose one yourself!

SotM Africa took place in Kampala, Uganda from the 8th to the 10th of July. Several tweets point to a great event with great success. We’ll report published blogs or recordings of the lectures as soon as they become available.

Wikimedia Italia has organised a two-day event in Spoleto (Umbria, Italy) on the 21st and 22nd of July dedicated to OSM and open data. The program includes talks about open (geo)data and public administrations, hiking maps, OSM and Wikipedia, and a full day for the mapping party.

Do you plan to attend SotM in Japan? This post on the OSM blog provides useful information about visa procedures.

Humanitarian OSM

After the two mapathons in Uganda and Istanbul (we reported) was examined to what extent the refugees could be involved in field mapping. The results were presented by HOT on a UNHCR meeting.

Education

Created in 2014, TeachOSM is an online resource to assist educators at all levels to introduce open source mapping using OpenStreetMap in the classroom. You can find mapping assignments, documentation and case studies. Do you have teaching material to share? This page explains how to contribute.

Maps

Mapcat is a new OSM- and Wikipedia-based mapping portal from Hungary that is catering to users internationally. The cat-pun-heavy introduction provides information about what they’re doing now and what they plan to do in the future.

OpenRouteService comes once again this week with an innovation! A new experimental “Quiet Routing” option is integrated into the LABS.OpenRouteService.org. It can generate routes that avoid noisy areas. This is adding to the “healthy” (stress reducing) routing theme, that has been introduced recently starting with the “prefer green areas” routing option. Both options can now be weighted dynamically. OSM data is also used for modeling the noise levels along the road.

Mapzen used the tangram engine to produce a futuristic-looking 3D map. Especially in large cities, the design looks like as it were from a science fiction movie. See New York or Birmingham.

Ilya Zverev describes in his user-blog how he creates Walking Papers: he now uses QGIS instead of Maperitive.

Programming

Andy Allan has joined the maintainers’ team for the OSM website. He aims to continue his work on refactoring, streamline issue processing, and communication to end users, including the moderation queue. Welcome Andy!

As reported last week, there have been problems caused by SEO spammers, especially in the USA. On Talk-US, Frederik Ramm published the Perl scripts that he used to identify likely candidates (just one edit, heavy use of certain unusual tags).

The GIScience Research Group of the University of Heidelberg is looking for a “Software Engineer Geoinformation Technology/OpenStreetMap”. The job is limited until June 2019.

Releases

Version 0.9 of the Graphhopper routing engine was released on May 31. There are a couple of highlights: public transport routing, and a new “hybrid mode” which is intended to support fast routing queries as well as support for turn costs and restrictions. Graphhopper is now also available on osm.org as a car profile, in addition to the existing bicycle & pedestrian profiles.

New releases are listed as usual on the OSM Software Watchlist. Here are some highlights:

Did you know …

Other “geo” things

Tanja Pfeffer, a student of the Hochschule Karlsruhe, has designed a map that changes projection according to zoom level. Check it here!

Mundialis offers a printing service that features satellite images as art compositions.

Forbes.at reported on Mapillary and the competition of the company with Google in terms of the self-driving cars.

Google Maps have made it easier for users to add missing data to places. This will enable the collection of more information on accessibility in restaurants and shops.

The International Cartographic Conference was held last week (2-7 July) in Washington, DC. Papers from thematic streams on Disaster Mapping (Cartography in Early Warning and Crisis Management), Mountain Cartography, Maps and Graphics for Blind and Partially-sighted People may be of particular interest.

Philipp Kandal, Senior Vice President of TeleNav mentioned, at ConCarExpo 2017 in Berlin, the work of his company using OSM data to improve navigation for autonomous cars.

2 thoughts on “weeklyOSM 364”

Thank you for the mention. WeeklyOSM’s characterization of my post on talk-us does shine a light on my desire to improve admin_level tagging in the US, though it was not quite correct. (I have been widely admonished of rambling in that post with the result that it is unclear; that seems to be true).

I did not say there is disharmony of admin_level tag values compared to US Census Bureau data. What I attempted to do in that post was notice that out of 50 states, it seems our US_admin_level wiki’s large table has 41 states “about correct,” but that the remaining 9 states suffer from some ambiguity or incorrectness simply because we have not reached consensus on what their values OUGHT to be.

Simultaneously, Minh Nguyen launched another wiki (US/Boundaries) which lists similar data in a friendlier format aimed more at novice users, but instead of providing a list of what admin_levels OUGHT to be tagged for US states, counties and cities (and villages and neighborhoods), that wiki instead says with what values OSM now DOES tag. (The so-called “prescriptive vs. descriptive” topic regarding our wiki).

I realize these distinctions are subtle and can be confusing. What I tried to do in that post was to solicit OSM volunteers with knowledge of admin_level structure in those remaining nine states and help us to sharpen up what they SHOULD be by helping us edit those into the table in our US_admin_level wiki.

Perhaps WeeklyOSM (or this Comment) can or will clarify this, perhaps not. But I do feel the need to clarify, as many seem to be confused by my post(s) on this topic. The good news is that some people “got it,” and several improvements have been made to the table, which then inspires those admin_level values (additions, corrections) to make their way into the map in the US.